Designer

Work Experience

About Facebook

Facebook is a leading internet company with a mission to connect the world, allow people to open up and bring them closer together.

Technical Program Manager

Part of the Infrastructure organization, working as a Product TPM with the Camera technology team. This involves elements of Computer Vision, Applied Machine Learning and Platform building with tools for creators, as well as SDK development for Facebook products including FB, Instagram and Messenger.

About Electronic Arts

EA is one of the largest video game developers and publishers in the world, with billion dollar franchises such as Battlefield and FIFA.
I have been working at EA since 2006 in software engineering, central technology and cross-discipline project management roles.

Technical Project Manager, EA Mobile Studios

Representing the EA Mobile Studios organization, (which includes all of EA's mobile game development studios and partners such as Marketing and Network Engagement,) in gathering and rationalizing central technology development requests, prioritizing against requests from the rest of the business, (such as Origin and console game teams,) then tracking the development and validation of those deliverables.

Senior Manager, Strategy & Business Operations

A facilitator for cross functional team collaboration to launch AAA games.
It takes an army to launch a major title from a headline franchise on time, to quality, on multiple platforms with various SKUs. As a member of the Launch Readiness team I would bring together a collection of experts of various disciplines from across the company to:

Form a development plan, listing out major deliverables and dependencies of these disparate teams upon each other.

Meet with these leads at a regular cadence to report on status and changes.

Report out to company executives on overall project status, with any major issues that need guidance or assistance.

Create support plans to triage and fix issues, with mitigation actions documented.

Prepare the company for a title launch including technology teams, hardware infrastructure, publishing, customer support, marketing, legal, web development, mobile development, game development and more.

Solve company wide, recurring issues that otherwise hinder game development.

Major accomplishments:

Reviewed, used and improved the server capacity planning model developed by the team, providing PSU forecasts for Need for Speed based on inputs provided by our sales forecasting team.

Shipping Need for Speed Rivals, the first and only title at EA to ship on PC, PS3, X360, PS4 and Xb1 simultaneously. In particular I created an overall project plan with the studio & partner teams and designed a Live Operations support plan, among other tasks.

Developer Relations Senior Account Manager, EA Digital Platform

I helped create fantastic experiences in titles such as Medal of Honor, Dead Space and Plants vs. Zombies through pairing development studios with proprietary online technologies and assisting with the integration, as well as taking them through the digital publishing process. This role covers aspects of project management, feature and technical design, technical support, evangalization and education.

Originally I was the sole member of the team in Europe, so I was covering all EU game development studios, both internal to EA, (including DICE, Criterion, Brightlight and Phenomic,) and external through EA Partners, (including Crytek, Starbreeze, Slightly Mad Studios and Bright Future.) Later I hired a team of three to replace me in Europe before I relocated back to the US where my focus was on NA studios including Visceral, Danger Close and PopCap.

Major accomplishments:

Shipping dozens titles, each with multiple SKUs and target platforms.

Assisting the company in defining and beginning the transition to a brand new digital platform.

Performed competitive analysis of Valve’s Steamworks platform to make it clear why EA’s technologies could more attractive to third party developers.

Provided design feedback to game teams to make their implementations easier & game features better through improved usage of various online related technologies, including everything from multiplayer gameplay and website integration, through to selling direct-to-consumer and DRM. Basically helped complete the puzzle by fitting the various tech pieces together that would allow a game design to work.

Gathered feedback from game teams, wrote and reviewed requirements for various EA online systems including Blaze, Nucleus, Keymaster, Origin and more.

Spent the majority of the time working as a sole member of the team in EU, working remotely from the rest of the team in the US.

Hired, trained and managed a small team in the UK to replace me before relocating back to the SF Bay Area.

Software Engineer, EA Global Online Studios

Working on an Online SDK, internal to EA, for use by game teams to develop multiplayer titles for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. This job then evolved into a Field Engineer position where I was supporting EA's game teams around the world in implementing their online and multiplayer features. I was asked to relocate to the UK so I could cover all EU titles in their timezone.

Major accomplishments:

Added several features to the online SDK including dynamically sizing transactions, improved memory management and changing the build system to use EA Tech’s Framework.

Had the highest bug fix rate on the team.

Began work on the next generation online SDK, which was to replace two previous SDKs by consolidating separate teams and producing a new system with a superset of the best features from before. Wrote some of the original code as well as producing documentation and sample code/applications.

Virtual Reality Design & Development

Designed and developed multiple VR applications. Used this as an opportunity to learn how to work with the Unity engine and the Google Cardboard/ Google VR SDK to create mobile VR experiences. Much of this content has been shared as tutorials on my blog and the code uploaded to GitHub. See all VR projects here.

iOS App Design & Development

Designed, coded and published several apps for iPhone from as early as iOS2, including CompareRideShare, (a website and app for comparing costs for Uber, Lyft & others for a journey,) Travel Companion, (a tool for remembering your loyalty card numbers and seeing which companies offer benefits to members,) Lotsa Dots, (a join-the-dots game for children,) and Rack 'Em, (a simple app for tracking pool scores with friends.)

Freelance Media Design & Development

Providing a media design service through HiAsh.com, (previously Cre@teUK,) since 2000 creating various works for small businesses, including web banner ads, print ads, Flash assets, full websites and more.

Freelancer, Fifth Dimension Productions

Part of the Fifth Dimension Productions team in London, working mostly with 3ds max, Photoshop and Illustrator to produce image assets for print advertising, brochures and websites.

Web Developer, GMTV

Contractor at GMTV in London Television Centre fully producing their b2b website from design to going live, single handedly.

Education

Full Sail University USA

Game Development, B.Sc.

First class degree, Valedictorian, several class awards and Lead on Final Project.